Reference · Usage

How usage is counted

Search is free. Credits pay for the rest: the rerank, deep search, the tools and drafting. Those calls cost different amounts because they are different work. A prior-art search runs a rerank over the corpus; reading an examiner's citations is one indexed lookup. Charging both the same would mean either pricing the cheap calls for the expensive one, or letting a client loop the expensive one at the cheap price.

The same tariff applies whether you call the REST endpoint or the MCP tool in front of it, because the tool proxies to the endpoint with your own key. Plans and prices are on the pricing page.

What each call costs

Four bands, so the cost of a call is something you can hold in your head rather than a per-endpoint tariff nobody reads.

Call	What it does	Credits
Prior art search search_prior_art	Two-stage retrieval over 10.5M patents: vector recall, then a rerank against your claim text. Every hit carries the passage it matched on.	10
Claim term support map map_claim_support	Grounds every claim term in the specification, and for a CIP or continuation in the parent specs, which is what decides whether a term is new matter.	10
Semantic patent-space locate locate_in_patent_space	Places an idea in the corpus and returns its neighbours, CPC sections and art units.	3
Patent whitespace opportunities find_whitespace	Regions of the space with thin coverage, filtered by section and opportunity.	3
Trace the citation web trace_citations	Walk the citation web out from a case: the opinions that cite it and the opinions that cite those (direction in), or what it cites and what those cite (direction out), at most two levels and at most 25 edges per node, most negative treatment first.	3
Patent claim text get_patent_claims	Full claim text and abstracts for up to 25 US applications per call.	1
Cited prior art map get_patent_citations	What an examiner actually cited against an application, examiner citations listed first.	1
Patent neighborhood get_patent_neighborhood	What sits closest to a given filing, by embedding rather than by classification.	1
Antecedent basis check check_antecedent_basis	§112(b) antecedent-basis defects in a draft or filed claim set. Deterministic, no model call.	1
Art unit profile get_art_unit_profile	One USPTO art unit: what it examines, its examiners, and its allowance and rejection rates.	1
Examiner search find_examiner	USPTO examiners by surname or art unit.	1
Examiner statistics get_examiner_profile	Rejection, allowance, interview and timing statistics for one examiner.	1
CPC code lookup lookup_cpc_code	What a CPC symbol covers, where it sits in the scheme, and which art units examine it.	1
Patent CPC classification get_patent_classification	The CPC symbols assigned to a published application or granted patent.	1
MPEP section get_mpep_section	One MPEP section, with its rules and examiner actions separated from the prose.	1
EPO Guidelines section get_epo_guideline	One section of the EPO Guidelines for Examination, in the same shape as an MPEP section.	1
Guidance Cross-References get_guidance_graph	What a guidance section points at and what points at it, one hop in each direction.	1
Office action form paragraph get_form_paragraph	The literal form paragraph an examiner pasted into an office action, by its code.	1
Form paragraphs by rejection type find_form_paragraphs	Form paragraphs filtered by rejection type or by the MPEP section they rest on.	1
USPTO design search code get_design_code	One USPTO design search code and what it covers.	1
Read a case read_case	Read one case from the citation web: its record (court, level, date, author, vote, publication, subject, the decision it reviewed), its good-law status with the dated events behind it, its subsequent history (later opinions reporting it reversed, affirmed, overruled or cert denied, each with the sentence), the overrulings naming it or made by it, and how many opinions cite it and it cites, by treatment.	1
Who cites a case list_citing_cases	List the opinions that cite a case, each with how it treated the case: treatment (the most negative label among its mentions, with label_counts for all of them), stance, depth (relied on, discussed, passing), whether it quoted, the pin pages, the citing signal and the sentence.	1
What a case relies on list_cited_authorities	List the cases one opinion cites, each with how the opinion treated it (treatment, label_counts, stance, depth, quoted, pin pages, signal, sentence).	1
Check good law check_good_law	Whether a case was displaced (overruled, abrogated, reversed, superseded), as of a date: the status (displaced, partially_displaced, standing or unverified), the dated events behind it with the deciding case, the overruling edges with the sentence each was read from, and the history reports that displaced it.	1

Drawings cost 2. Map tiles, manifests, and anything not listed cost 1. An endpoint that appears without a price in this table costs 1, which is the safe direction: a new cheap route billed at 1 is right, and a new expensive one shows up as our problem rather than as your outage.

What each plan covers

The same allowance read two ways. The left column is what you plan against; the right is what the meter counts.

Plan	Covers	Credits / mo
Evaluate	200 free API searches a day, and 500 credits a month for tools and drafting	500
Launch	2,000 free API searches a day, and 2,500 credits a month for tools, serving to twice that	2,500

Searches and credits are counted apart. A search with ask, without the rerank, spends no credits; the credits go to the tools, the rerank and drafting. Over MCP on your own key, search has no daily limit.

Ceilings and headroom

Three limits apply, and each does a different job. All of them count in UTC: the daily count restarts at 00:00 UTC, and the monthly allowance at 00:00 UTC on the 1st.

Monthly credits

The allowance your plan includes. What happens once it is spent depends on the plan.

Launch keeps serving past the allowance, up to twice it. Calls in that range are flagged with X-Antecedint-Plan-Overage and are not charged. Past twice the allowance, calls are refused until the month resets.
Free keeps a daily floor: once the month's credits are spent, 20 credits a day keep working, counted against that UTC day's spend, until the allowance comes back on the 1st.
Enterprise limits are set by the agreement.

Use past the allowance is forgiven when the month resets. Nothing carries into the next month, and nothing is billed for it after the fact.

Purchased credits

Credits bought as a top-up, or committed under an agreement. They do not reset and do not expire, and they are spent only once the monthly allowance is gone, so covering a busy month in advance is not a bet on that month. The balance never goes below zero.

Requests per day

A burst guard, so a runaway loop cannot spend a month in an hour. It protects your allowance as well as our capacity. It restarts at 00:00 UTC, and your account page shows today's count against it.

A key that belongs to a firm spends the firm's pool: the monthly credits, the purchased balance and the ceilings above are the firm's, shared by every key in it.

What counts

Tool calls and REST calls spend credits. The MCP protocol messages around them do not: initialize, tools/list, ping and notifications cost nothing, so a client that reconnects often is not charged for it. The front door's lookups (get_status, list_tools, describe_tool and the other list and read tools) are free as well. So is reporting a data error with submit_data_feedback, up to 100 reports a day; a person reviews each one, and an accepted report earns 10, 50 or 200 credits.

Runs made on the site count against your key like any other call. That covers the Run buttons in these docs, the sandbox, and the search on the home page when you are signed in: each runs on a one-hour token bound to your key and spends from its allowance.

Reading it from code

Every authenticated response says where you stand, so there is no dashboard to poll. GET /api/v1/usage returns the same figures as one JSON document.

RateLimit · RateLimit-Policy

The daily request limit, in the IETF RateLimit header form: the limit, what remains today, and seconds until the 00:00 UTC reset.

X-Antecedint-Credits

The monthly credit allowance and what remains of it.

X-Antecedint-Plan-Overage: true

Present when the call was served from the headroom past your monthly allowance. It is not an error and the response is normal. Treat it as the cue to look at your plan size, not as something to retry or back off from.

429 · USAGE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED

A limit was reached. The body reports the daily and monthly figures the decision used, and credits.required says what the refused call would have cost, so you can tell a large call hitting a small remainder from an allowance that is spent. Retry-After gives the seconds until the limit that refused the call resets.

503 · FREE_TIER_CAPACITY

The free tier's shared capacity is full for the moment. It has nothing to do with your allowance: it is a shared pool, and Retry-After says when to come back. Paid plans are not subject to it.

Reading it from an MCP client

An agent sees its usage without a separate call. Every tool result ends with a one-line usage summary (what the call cost, what is left this month, and when it resets, in UTC), and carries the same figures as structured data in _meta.

get_status returns the full picture on demand, and costs nothing. A tool call refused on quota comes back as a JSON-RPC error with code -32003 and USAGE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED in its data, rather than as a tool result, so a client can tell a spent allowance from a failed search.

Throughput

Separate from credits, and the ceiling a busy workload usually meets first, including free search over MCP. Rate limits are a property of your key rather than of the deployment, so they move with your plan.

Plan	Throughput
Evaluate	60 messages/min · 15 tool calls/min
Launch	300 messages/min · 60 tool calls/min
Enterprise	By agreement, with dedicated rerank capacity

A JSON-RPC batch counts as one request for rate limiting but spends the credits of every tool call inside it, so batching is a way to save round trips rather than credits.